"America I'm putting my queer shoulder to the wheel"

This is the second of three Sunday columns celebrating the 250th Anniversary of the Declaration of Independence. Each week, we’ll look at one poem that touches on one of the great principles of our nation: Equality, Liberty, and Indivisibility.

Last week, Equality—here.

This week, Liberty.

What does it mean to be free?

“It’s a free country,” we like to say.

Is it? What do we mean when we say that?

The idea of liberty is central to the American journey, and it has been contested since before the ink on the Declaration dried. It turns out that “Liberty,'“ in the hands of generations of Americans, is a pretty slippery concept.

The Brits called out the sinister elasticity of “Liberty” in America as soon as they read Thomas Jefferson’s magnificent sentence.

“How is it that we hear the loudest yelps for liberty among the drivers of negroes?” Samuel Johnson, the English critic and lexicographer, contemptuously asked.

The English abolitionist Thomas Day cut deeper: “If there be an object truly ridiculous in nature, it is an American patriot, signing resolutions of independency with the one hand, and with the other brandishing a whip over his affrighted slaves.”

And it kept meaning its opposite.

John C. Calhoun, Senator and Vice President from South Carolina and the fiercest champion of the “rights” of slaveowners, constructed an entire intellectual edifice to perform the immoral linguistic alchemy.

"It is a great and dangerous error," he wrote in his Disquisition on Government, "to suppose that all people are equally entitled to liberty."

Liberty was, Calhoun declared, "a reward to be earned, not a blessing to be gratuitously lavished on all alike—a reward reserved for the intelligent, the patriotic, the virtuous and deserving—and not a boon to be bestowed on a people too ignorant, degraded and vicious, to be capable either of appreciating or of enjoying it."

Does that sound familiar to you? Hear any echoes of it in our own time?

Calhoun was (and still is, by some conservatives) considered to be a great political theorist, an intellectual of the first rank.

But Abraham Lincoln, with his characteristic clarity and biting humor, punctured the moral idiocy of Calhoun’s argument with a simple story.

Imagine, he told audiences, a shepherd driving a wolf away from a sheep’s throat just in time. The sheep will thank the shepherd as a liberator; the wolf will denounce him as a destroyer of liberty.

"Plainly," Lincoln concluded, "the sheep and the wolf are not agreed upon a definition of the word."

Same word. There’s a lot of mischief in it.

In the 1950s, Southern segregationists shifted the resonance slightly, but kept the claim to power in their reaction to the Supreme Court case of Brown v Board of Education. “Freedom of choice,” they demanded.

So Southern school boards kept both public schools open and let each child "choose" annually between the formerly-white and formerly-Black one. But then they relied on fear, inertia, threats, and social pressure to keep the choosing from happening. Black children and white children were regarded as “free” to attend the other race's school if they so desired. And almost none did. The Supreme Court put a stop to this charade in the 1968 case of Green v. County School Board of New Kent County.

Which brings us to Allen Ginsberg, and his great, strange ode to our beloved country.

The leading figure of the Beat Movement in American literature, Ginsberg liked to say that he was America’s greatest Jewish, Marxist, Zen Buddhist, homosexual poet. He was right about that. Not a whole lot of competition for that title, really.

In truth, Allen Ginsberg was one of the freest men who ever lived. A lifelong dissenter, openly gay when that was dangerous, a man fearlessly himself.

He learned the fierce posture of self-liberation from Walt Whitman, his "lonely old courage-teacher," he called him. Whitman’s epic poem, "Song of Myself" is somehow also a song of everyone, an ecstatic declaration of universal love. The "I" at the heart of it turns out to be a "we."

And right there, in the greatest work of our greatest poet, is the American answer to the slippery word, “Liberty”: self-expression so true and deep that it opens outward onto the whole people, instead of closing in against them.

So this is Allen Ginsberg’s ode to our country.

On the poem. It is long, maddening, and at times sexually explicit. (It’s Allen Ginsberg.) In one passage Ginsberg puts on the voice of the country's own bigotry, and deploys a racist slur. That passage is fierce anti-racist satire and worth reading whole—but it is not needed for our theme here, and I will not set that word under this masthead. I have marked the cut; the full poem is a click away.

—Terry

by Allen Ginsberg

America I’ve given you all and now I’m nothing.

America two dollars and twentyseven cents January 17, 1956.   

I can’t stand my own mind.

America when will we end the human war?

Go fuck yourself with your atom bomb.

I don’t feel good don’t bother me.

I won’t write my poem till I’m in my right mind.

America when will you be angelic?

When will you take off your clothes?

When will you look at yourself through the grave?

When will you be worthy of your million Trotskyites?

America why are your libraries full of tears?

America when will you send your eggs to India?

I’m sick of your insane demands.

When can I go into the supermarket and buy what I need with my good looks?

America after all it is you and I who are perfect not the next world.   

Your machinery is too much for me.

You made me want to be a saint.

There must be some other way to settle this argument.   

Burroughs is in Tangiers I don’t think he’ll come back it’s sinister.   

Are you being sinister or is this some form of practical joke?   

I’m trying to come to the point.

I refuse to give up my obsession.

America stop pushing I know what I’m doing.

America the plum blossoms are falling.

I haven’t read the newspapers for months, everyday somebody goes on trial for murder.

America I feel sentimental about the Wobblies.

America I used to be a communist when I was a kid I’m not sorry.   

I smoke marijuana every chance I get.

I sit in my house for days on end and stare at the roses in the closet.   

When I go to Chinatown I get drunk and never get laid.   

My mind is made up there’s going to be trouble.

You should have seen me reading Marx.

My psychoanalyst thinks I’m perfectly right.

I won’t say the Lord’s Prayer.

I have mystical visions and cosmic vibrations.

America I still haven’t told you what you did to Uncle Max after he came over from Russia.

I’m addressing you.

Are you going to let your emotional life be run by Time Magazine?   

I’m obsessed by Time Magazine.

I read it every week.

Its cover stares at me every time I slink past the corner candystore.   

I read it in the basement of the Berkeley Public Library.

It’s always telling me about responsibility. Businessmen are serious. Movie producers are serious. Everybody’s serious but me.   

It occurs to me that I am America.

I am talking to myself again.

Asia is rising against me.

I haven’t got a chinaman’s chance.

I’d better consider my national resources.

My national resources consist of two joints of marijuana millions of genitals an unpublishable private literature that jetplanes 1400 miles an hour and twentyfive-thousand mental institutions.

I say nothing about my prisons nor the millions of underprivileged who live in my flowerpots under the light of five hundred suns.

I have abolished the whorehouses of France, Tangiers is the next to go.

My ambition is to be President despite the fact that I’m a Catholic.

America how can I write a holy litany in your silly mood?

I will continue like Henry Ford my strophes are as individual as his automobiles more so they’re all different sexes.

America I will sell you strophes $2500 apiece $500 down on your old strophe

America free Tom Mooney

America save the Spanish Loyalists

America Sacco & Vanzetti must not die

America I am the Scottsboro boys.

America when I was seven momma took me to Communist Cell meetings they sold us garbanzos a handful per ticket a ticket costs a nickel and the speeches were free everybody was angelic and sentimental about the workers it was all so sincere you have no idea what a good thing the party was in 1835 Scott Nearing was a grand old man a real mensch Mother Bloor the Silk-strikers’ Ewig-Weibliche made me cry I once saw the Yiddish orator Israel Amter plain. Everybody must have been a spy.

America you don’t really want to go to war.

America its them bad Russians.

Them Russians them Russians and them Chinamen. And them Russians.   

The Russia wants to eat us alive. The Russia’s power mad. She wants to take our cars from out our garages.

Her wants to grab Chicago. Her needs a Red Reader’s Digest. Her wants our auto plants in Siberia. Him big bureaucracy running our fillingstations.

That no good. Ugh. Him make Indians learn read. [Line omitted.]. Hah. Her make us all work sixteen hours a day. Help.   

America this is quite serious.

America this is the impression I get from looking in the television set.   

America is this correct?

I’d better get right down to the job.

It’s true I don’t want to join the Army or turn lathes in precision parts factories, I’m nearsighted and psychopathic anyway.

America I’m putting my queer shoulder to the wheel.

Berkeley, January 17, 1956